


Boustrophedon

by schiarire



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:10:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schiarire/pseuds/schiarire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Camilla and Charles, Camilla and Henry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boustrophedon

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Aimeek

 

 

Henry's never-kissed lips tasted slightly of Julian's tea service. _I must tell Charles_ , Camilla thought, _how funny_. How funny, she thought then, to know something she could never tell Charles.

~

That night she washes up; Charles dries. The dishes flash from her right hand to his left. The transitions thus quickly; more quickly thus the whole. Brother and sister do not touch. Nor do they, as unscrupulous persons imagine, often speak in coterminous sentences. Rather their conversation doubles back on itself like a snake being charmed from a pot; like the pinched folds of a paper fan.

~

"ουτοι τουτο δυνησομεσθα,"  
said Henry.

"No?" said Camilla. "Won't we be able to, though?"

With the broad heel of his hand, he brushed back the hair that lay over his glasses. The left lens was bronzed with a thin, greasy film that glew like an oil slick in the circling kerosene lamplight. "It was only a bit of Archilochos," he said. "It doesn't mean anything, Camilla."

Camilla asked, "And the rest?"

"No, that's all. That's all there is."

"If I remind you of Archilochos already," Camilla said, "we really will be over before we start."

~

Charles zips her up in the morning. Camilla winds a pastel scarf around his throat, tight enough for the wool to _gratte_.

"Having a bad day already, Milly?" says Charles, loosening the knot. "D'you want coffee? I could call Francis, we won't be late if we drive."

Camilla looks into his eyes: gray, lucid. "We haven't got any cream."

"You could drink it with -- No, you couldn't, could you? Francis could stop and get some."

"Then we really will be late." Camilla sighs. She hooks her arm through his; slips her hand into the pocket of his belted coat. "Oh, well. We have Aeschylus today, remember. And Julian will make tea."

Charles rubs his worried shoulder on hers. "You always say tea isn't strong enough."

"One makes do," she says. "Besides, we can pretend that it's war time, and the coffee's been rationed."

~

What she liked about Henry was his liminal existence, his ability to step out of his mind and take in the whole of the world with a glance, step back. It had been easy to see how Henry turned himself inward, to see him watch the dark rush of the Mincio as he lectured and his words followed after each other with the plodding constance of his big ox heart; but it was a long time before she saw him turn that total concentration on anyone living. In the end Francis told her, when he was drunk, "Henry likes you, you know," and she was not drunk enough to say, _I know_ , so what she said instead was, "Are you sure?"

Francis took off his _pince-nez_. What he said then was only, without smiling, "Oh, please."

~

At home it is light out and warm and she and Charles lie out on the porch stirring lemonade with crazy straws. They are Leonard and Virginia Woolf today. They use too much sugar and read to each other in English, a language of which Camilla is fonder than she can tell Henry.

"'What she loved,'" reads Charles, strong and clear and without hesitation, "'was this, here, now, in front of her,'" and what she loves, here, now, in front of her, is him: is Leonard-Charles with the legs of his trousers rolled up.

~

Camilla helped Henry pack before they separated for the summer. He did not let her carry anything heavy; she did not let on that she cared. Before he left, in an anachronism, he bowed to her, stiff and starchy and low, as if he were a stranger, transplanted from another country. She thought this might be Henry's idea of a joke, but it did not work because he was so awkward inside his big skin, as if there were too much space and he were wearing his body like another man's clothes, another man's chain mail and armor.

Then she thought, no, that was why it worked; that was why exactly. When he pulled out into the road she lifted her hand in open-fingered salute and the sun showered through the gaps, limned her in gold.

~

Ptolemy and Arsinoë, they kiss at night between threadbare sheets of inherited Egyptian cotton with her seashell collection scattered over the dresser in small change and handfuls of sand. They never surprise each other now and they never knock anything over, they never make mistakes. On the other side of that thin wall sleeps their grandmother, unwoken, her hearing as sharp today as fifty years ago, trapped in the forgotten middle of time, sitting at the piano.

~

In the end days, it strikes Camilla that all along both these paths have been driving in the same direction, driving at the same _telos_ , chained together as she is chained to this time, this unbreakable present in which she cannot unbe or undo what she has been and done. What she wants is to erase: to erase the way Charles sounds when he's drunk, the way he looks at her when the snow falls and they fill every cup and glass and mug in the house with broad-leafed tulips, the feel of his fists and the satisfaction she felt when she ripped out a handful of his fair, identical hair.

She searches for the perfect point to turn back to, after they met each other and fell into routines of friendship, but before Bunny went over the cliff. Before the farmer, perhaps? Before Richard? Going through her diary with a red pen, she looks for the date when everything went wrong. But she cannot find the exact day, let alone the exact minute, the exact thought, the exact mind that thought it. In the end she realizes that if he hasn't already, Charles will probably find and read her diary. It is with this threat in mind that she takes the diary out to the playground and burns it; afterwards, she realizes that she should, logically speaking, have been worried about the police.

~

Everything gets worse. The worse things get, the less Camilla can bear to think about them. The less she thinks about them, the more Richard's blank, gaping uncertainty forces her to think about them. The less she thinks about them, the more Charles's casual, unstoppable violence makes her remember blood clotted cold into her hair, forces her to think about them. The less she thinks about them, the more Charles's slow, slurring speech reminds her that she could not speak for three days after the murder. He makes her remember the animal noises that spilled from her lips. He makes her think about that. His mere presence forces her to do it.

Henry does not seem to think about things; or if he does, it is not in the same way that she does, the way that wakes her in the night and makes her talk to herself in every language she knows, just to see if she still can. More than she can ever remember him being before, Henry is the perfect exception: restrung and retuned through sin; singled out among mortals for eudaimonia.

~

She and Charles have not made up. She knows they will never make up again; not really. She knows, too, that what he is allowed to do, and what she is allowed to do, are different, have always been different, will always be different. It is this discrepancy, more than anything, that makes her angry. More than anything, her acknowledgment of it means an end to their _modus vivendi_ , and that makes her furious.

She's in the living room writing a Greek composition when Charles launches a glass across the room, straight at her head, and she ducks without batting an eye. She would have thrown something back once, but it seems so pointless now, fighting with someone too drunk to surprise her, someone she can't think about as her brother, someone new, someone who veered from the given direction, mere wreckage, unsalvageable.

Either she leaves, Camilla thinks, or she will kill him. She knows this now, that she can kill people. She knows it as she knows her own name, her shoe size, the ophidian scar formation next to her navel from when she was six and had the chicken pox. She thinks about being six and having the chicken pox, and giving it to Charles, and sinking paper boats together in the sticky, palliative waves of their oatmeal baths. While she thinks this it takes her twenty-four seconds to open the door. Her hands are shaking.

~

Between the doorknob's hollow rattle and the smell of kerosene Camilla remembers nothing. She does not say, _I can't go home again_ , or at least, she does not say that yet. And she cannot ask Henry, _How do you do it_. Instead she sits at one end of the sofa with her feet bared on his thigh and asks, "What are you doing?"

"Reading," says Henry.

And Camilla thinks, if she can do what he does, empty her mind and fill it with other men's thoughts, she will be all right. She will not die. She will survive this.

"Read to me," she says.

Henry looks at her, spectacled, his eyes eclipsed, and does not ask, _Why_. He does not say, _Yes_. Without prelude he begins, with a fluent, natural rhythm, to read aloud:

> εχουα θαλλον μυρσινης ετερπετο  
>  ροδης τε καλον ανθος, η δε οι κομη  
>  ωμους κατεσκιαζε και μεταφρενα 

~

  
Camilla grasps _how_ in that movement between the syllables, the forward pull of man's fate. What Henry reads to her is not profound; is only a fragment, part of a whole that has passed out of the world, forever. What he reads to her is the algebraic remainder of loss. What he reads to her has survived more than two thousand years of destruction. Grass growing green over rubble, this piece of a poem is: the unkillable germ of life; the illusion of progress, perpetual motion. 

~

_She held_  
a sprig of myrtle she'd picked  
And a rose  
That pleased her most  
Of those on the bush  
And her long hair shaded  
her shoulders and back  


 


End file.
